“Get a Problem, Solve a Problem”: Vulnerability,

Precarity and Vigilantism in ’s

Novels

Mafaz Mahmoud

English Studies - Literature Bachelor 15 ECTS Credits Spring Semester 2020 Supervisor: Asko Kauppinen

Abstract

This paper analyzes how vulnerability is represented in the Jack Reacher series, by drawing on work by Bryan Turner and Judith Butler. The purpose of the research is to investigate the reason

Reacher’s acts of vigilantism are needed. I look at examples of vulnerability and precarity found in the books and Die Trying, and argue that state neglect is the cause of economic and social vulnerability in the towns Margrave and Yorke, leading to precarity expressed as criminal money and community subjugation controlling the towns. I conclude that the solution presented, through vigilantism, is reassuring but insufficient, but that the series, in representing a complex display of vulnerability and acknowledging the insufficiency of the solution, stresses the difficulty of presenting a simple solution to the multifaceted nature of the issue of vulnerability.

Contents Introduction ...... 1 Vulnerability and Precarity ...... 6 Neglected Towns ...... 11 Vigilantism ...... 19 A Hybrid Ending ...... 23 Conclusion ...... 26 Works Cited ...... 28

Mahmoud 1

Introduction - Humor me, look out the window; tell me what you see. - I see the same things I see every day. - Well, imagine you’ve never seen it. - Jack Reacher

The crime thriller Jack Reacher series, written by author Lee Child, is about an ex-

military cop who wanders the US seeing the country he never saw when he was still in service

and stumbling into problems he needs to solve along the way. When asked where Reacher came

from, Child answered that he started writing and “Reacher came out; in a way he has always

existed in the subconscious” (ITV News 5:15 – 5:20). What he means is that Reacher descends

from a richness of mythological figures and has shown up throughout different times in history.

In “Critical Investigations: Convention and Ideology in ,” William

Stowe argues that “we must be willing to treat popular fiction not as mindless pastimes or

anonymous cultural documents, but as self-conscious works of literary art” (571). While the first

part of this proposition strikes me as true— genre fiction is not a mere mindless pastime— the

second part assumes an initial non-credibility of the genre, an association with the dime novel

that it needs defending from, and thus seeks to assign genre fiction a supposed high “literary art”

status in order to show its potential.

But genre’s strength lies rather in its disinterest in status. Its utmost goal of engaging the

reader is an ample substitute to aspiring towards the values ascribed to literary art. As Nancy

Holland points out in “Genre Fiction and ‘The Origin of The Work of Art’,” like photography

and blues music, with genre fiction:

Readers are meant to feel as if they are experiencing the story, not reading it. Thus,

“artful” language that would call attention to itself would be a serious flaw in this kind of Mahmoud 2

writing. We are not meant to think, “Boy, that’s beautiful. I’d never thought about it that

way before”; we are supposed to think “Okay, what’s going to happen next.” (218)

The ease and clarity of the language of genre fiction work to engage the reader through not bringing attention to itself. It reflects the language the reader uses in their daily life, which gives a sense of familiarity that communicates a message that the world in the book is similar enough to the world of the reader. This familiarity is one part of the illusion genre fiction creates; the other is the formula followed in such books.

The basic formula, the “beginning-middle-end structure[,] is one clear hallmark of genre fiction”, continues Holland (217). While most stories have these three qualities, with genre fiction, the reader may know how the story would unfold and what is to be expected, including, as Holland notes, the way it ends:

[N]ot just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of

well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity’s ability to survive even the

most alien (and most familiar) of threats. (217)

The ideal ending provides a sense of comfort that may not exist in reality, and together with direct language, creates the illusion of a world familiar, yet better than the one being represented.

Whereas this creation of illusion lies at the centre of much of the criticism directed towards genre fiction, Holland asserts, it is in this power of illusion that the subversive ability of genre fiction lies (218). Through presenting an engaging, familiar enough world for the reader to be immersed in with an ideal ending that promises a “slightly different, better world, [genre] may have the paradoxical effect of making us less content with the one in which we live”, prompting a change (Holland 220). The romance and the western are examples of genres Holland uses that demonstrate this point clearly. In the late 1970s, “[a]fter generations of portraying working Mahmoud 3

‘girls’ who wanted nothing more than marriage in their lives, romance novels started championing the working woman’s right to have a lifelong career”, she writes (Holland 221).

The romance evolves with the cultural change it documents and inspires, but for the western, according to Holland, it is the disappearance that counts. The reason why the western has all but disappeared is that the western is no longer relevant; the reassuring fantasy of the western, she writes, “is to help us believe that the solitary righteous individual can triumph over chaos and evil” (Holland 221). While this fantasy of individualization would have been the preferred reading of the last century, she continues, it is no longer relevant for the “Generation X dot.com workers who understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, to be genuinely empowered as individuals in our contemporary world” (Holland 221). Like its classic protagonist on a mission, the western finished the job and moved on. However, even if the western has all but disappeared, the solitary, righteous individual hero has not disappeared. Instead, it certainly lives on in suspense such as the Jack Reacher series, albeit in an updated way, something that inspired research to uncover the appeal on this bestselling series.

Since Reacher is central to the series, much of the research done has focused on Reacher himself. Jeroen Vermeulen, in “The Lonely Road to Freedom: Jack Reacher’s Interpretation of an American Myth”, argues that Reacher is characterized most by the “notion of sovereign freedom, a kind of absolute freedom that seems unattainable in ‘the land of the free’ in times when even the American Dream is government-issued”, which he calls a “utopian interpretation of freedom” that plays a pivotal part in the series’ success (122). Similarly, Lee

Mitchell, in “Fairytales and Thrillers: The Contradictions of Formula Narratives” attributes the novels’ success to Reacher’s “one obsession: to stay anonymous by living off-the-grid” (121), which offers a sense of comfort in a world that’s increasingly tracking our every move. Mahmoud 4

Looking at the previous research, while it sheds light into Reacher’s appeal, it provides no account for what he does. What has not been researched are the reasons this individual loner hero intervenes in the problems of the places he visits, or why he is needed. This, I claim, is due to the state of vulnerability present in the communities he helps, which results from lack of governmentality, which in turn exposes them to criminality.

The various natures of vulnerability researched highlights the wide definition of the word. In his “’How Safe Do You Feel?’: James Bond, Skyfall, and the Politics of the Secret

Agent in an Age of Ubiquitous Threat” essay, James Smith explores cyberterrorism and the ways it exposes governmental vulnerability, meaning threats putting the government into a tough position which requires Bond’s help, most apparent in the Bond’s villain, “a master computer hacker who steals MI6’s closest secrets and leaks them on the Internet” (147), giving Bond an enemy he cannot beat. Also, Liani Lochner, in “The Politics of Precarity: Contesting

Neoliberalism's Subjects in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger” investigates the vulnerability of the individual and the community in the age of globalization, characterized most by inequality through which “certain groups in society are exposed to, and others are protected from, violence”

(37). Focusing on two books from the Jack Reacher series, Killing Floor and Die Trying, I investigate how one of the most successful crime fiction series engages with the issue of vulnerability.

In the next chapter, “Vulnerability and Precarity”, I present how vulnerability started, the different types of vulnerabilities and the relationship between them. Then, in the “Neglected

Towns” chapter, I argue that the novels construct an image of vulnerability that is caused by governmental failure, with Killing Floor highlighting an economic vulnerability in a Georgia town called Margrave, and Die Trying bringing forth a case of social vulnerability in a Montana Mahmoud 5 town called Yorke. I also argue that the abuse of these vulnerabilities results in criminal acts of money counterfeiting and violent takeover, requiring Reacher’s intervention. In the chapter

“Vigilantism”, I argue that the novel’s solution to the vulnerabilities of the town is represented through acts of vigilantism that end the criminality and give a solution that is reassuring, but ultimately insufficient. Lastly, in the chapter “Hybrid Ending” I argue that while the solution is insufficient, leaving the vulnerabilities intact, it is not fairytale-like, due to Reacher’s cooperation with the police throughout the books, which works to include figures of authority in the solution. In doing so, I conclude that while the solution offered does not treat the root of the problem, the Jack Reacher series highlights an awareness of the difficulty of presenting a simple solution to a problem that requires collective action. Mahmoud 6

Vulnerability and Precarity

What makes people vulnerable is a question of who’s answering it, but as it is central to the notion of vulnerability, exposure to threat is at the centre of every definition. Originally, vulnerability meant the body’s susceptibility to harm. Bryan Turner, in Vulnerability and Human

Rights, argues that the term took its emergence from the frailty of “human beings as embodied agents” (25). Vulnerability, which goes back to the early 17th century Latin vulnus, “to wound”, acknowledges the “obviously corporeal dimension of existence” (Turner 28). This corporeal vulnerability, dealing with body’s susceptibility to illness, poverty and death, associates vulnerability with suffering, and has taken the stage in discussions in human rights discourse, as

Turner argues that war zones are proof that we ought to be protected from such suffering (44).

Along with corporeal vulnerability came a psychological one, as Turner notes that human vulnerability now refers not just to bodily suffering, but also “to our ability to suffer psychologically, morally, and spiritually” (28), giving the concept an abstract dimension.

As the term developed, it found its way into discourses concerning the economy and society. Lino Briguglio, in his “Exposure to external shocks and economic resilience of countries”, defines economic vulnerability as a system’s “susceptibility to being harmed by external economic forces as a result of exposure to such forces” (1058), in a study aimed at suggesting policies that help countries recover from shocks affecting the economy. In other words, vulnerability here refers to how economically weak a system is.

Social vulnerability, on the other hand, has a wider and harder definition to narrow down including, but not limited to, how in the case of communities in small towns for example, they can be, as Arthur Morgan puts it in The Small Community: Foundation of Democratic Life, Mahmoud 7

“despised, neglected, exploited and robbed” (3), meaning various kinds of attacks that affects society as a whole.

Before moving forward, I would like to go into the connection between these different types of vulnerabilities to later analyse how vulnerability is utilized in the Jack Reacher series.

Despite being different in their details, human, social and economic vulnerabilities all share an

“openness” or exposure to factors which constitute a threat. Like the body’s susceptibility to illness, the economy may be threatened by inflation, and society by terrorism. We can also see that these vulnerabilities are not completely separate from one another, but rather an attack on one part can affect another. Pandemics, for example, affect both society and the economy.

However, the nature of this connection can still hold some confusion in its details as, clearly, illness is not the same as inflation, which brings me back to Turner who, in an otherwise well-argued text, limits vulnerability to being a corporeal condition in his argument for human rights. For Turner, vulnerability’s association with suffering underlines his argument that it is ontological. He writes that “human beings share a common ontology that is grounded in a shared vulnerability” (Turner 6), and bases his discussion on this shared ontological vulnerability. In doing so, he fails to make a distinction between the varying degrees of susceptibility to harm.

Someone’s vulnerability to, say, illness or assault, in a first world country, for example, is not the same as it is for someone in a war zone. Judith Butler makes this distinction clear.

The richness in Butler’s work on vulnerability, mainly in Vulnerability in Resistance, lies in her argument that vulnerability is a political condition. This works to both encompass all the vulnerabilities mentioned earlier while equally showing how to better characterize them. She insists that while “as much as ‘vulnerability’ can be affirmed as an existential condition, since we are all subject to accidents, illness, and attacks that can expunge our lives quite quickly, it is also Mahmoud 8 a socially induced condition” (Butler 25), and for this reason, “vulnerability and invulnerability have to be understood as politically produced” (Butler 5). What she means is, a general susceptibility to suffering, shared by everyone, is not the same as the suffering of those living in poverty, for example. In the first case, the possibility of encountering harm is inherent and nonpreventable, while in the other case— where measures can be taken to eliminate or reduce poverty— it is drastically larger. Poverty, a constituted situation due to political failure, can be, and is, preventable. So is an attack on the economy due to failure of policy, and equally an attack on society due to lack of security. The name she gives for the second, constituted type of vulnerability, is precarity. Precarity, then, for Butler, is disproportionate amount of suffering, politically produced and not inherently existent.

Both these notions, vulnerability and precarity, are part of my analysis on the Jack

Reacher series. Killing Floor shows an example of mainly an economic vulnerability, while Die

Trying presents a case of predominantly social vulnerability in a Montana town called Yorke.

Also, in both towns, precarity has come to exist after the economic and social vulnerabilities were abused, by criminal wealth in Margrave, and community subjugation in Yorke, resulting in adverse effects on the communities of both towns.

I also discuss how the precarity is resolved, to show that the need for vigilantism is justified in the novels through the impossibility of vulnerable communities to engage in an active response themselves. To better engage in this discussion and understand what an active response is, I take up Butler’s argument on the agency of vulnerability.

Butler argues that there is an agency in vulnerability that can, and should, be used to resist precarity. There is an assumption that vulnerability equals total passivity, which characterizes groups deemed vulnerable with “powerlessness and lack of agency” (Butler 25). Mahmoud 9

This is problematic, for Butler, for if vulnerability is passive, “what about the power of those who are oppressed?” (23). Such thinking, Butler contends, means to give all power away:

All the power [thus] belongs to the state and international institutions that are now

supposed to offer them protection and advocacy. Such moves tend to underestimate …

modes of political agency and resistance that emerge within so-called vulnerable

populations. (25)

Examples of public protests, hunger strikes and artistic expression all show that vulnerability can join resistance in the demand to end precarity. Neither fully passive nor agentic, vulnerability

“belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another” (Butler 25). So, while this does not negate the fact that an unacceptable amount of suffering has taken place, it seeks to respond to it rather than passively submit to its consequences. As I will show in the chapter, “Vigilantism”, the option of active response is not always possible.

To summarize, it is first worth repeating the difference between vulnerability and precarity. While vulnerability is a sense of general openness, precarity is a case of disproportionate amount of instability, affecting systems or communities, that is politically produced. While definitions of social, economic and corporeal vulnerabilities differ in their details, they all allude to a decreased quality of living. Examining Reacher through the lens of vulnerability and precarity offers insight into the connection between these different types of vulnerabilities. It expresses a change in the economic and social condition that ultimately directly affects the lives of residents. In adopting a political stance on the issue of vulnerability, we are better able to both assess and tackle it than if the notion was limited to its corporeal dimension.

So, while a political approach takes the focus away from the corporeal vulnerability of the Mahmoud 10 human and into vulnerabilities that address mistakes in the system, it still works to guarantee human safety through eliminating the problems which may threaten it. Mahmoud 11

Reacher

Neglected Towns

Killing Floor and Die Trying each highlight a different type of vulnerability to begin with, but later show that this type is interconnected with another, and ultimately directly puts people’s lives at risk. In a Georgia town called Margrave in Killing Floor, economic vulnerability is expressed through the combination of the town’s modern infrastructure, which suggests wealth and prosperity, and a lifelessness that contrasts its appearance. This economic vulnerability is exacerbated by criminal wealth to a precarity disguised as luxury. In Die Trying, the social vulnerability of a Montana town called Yorke is displayed more directly, and a violent takeover of the town and subjugation of its community amplifies it. In both towns, the vulnerability is ultimately caused by state neglect.

Reacher arrives to Margrave to inquire about a blues musician he remembers his brother once mentioned died there, and is met with a town of a very modern architecture. He notes a vibrant atmosphere as soon as he arrives:

Attractive county architecture on a generous budget. Roads were smooth tarmac,

sidewalks were red blocks. Three hundred yards south, I could see a blinding white

church steeple behind a small huddle of buildings. I could see flagpoles, awnings, crisp

paint, green lawns … A prosperous community. Built, I guessed on prosperous farm

incomes and high taxes on the commuters who worked up in Atlanta. (Killing Floor 16)

Presented at the beginning of the book, such descriptions of Margrave set the expectation of a thriving place. Even more, when Reacher is arrested and taken to a police office for a reason he does not yet know while eating at a diner shortly after his arrival, he can’t help but notice that, judging by “[t]he way the place looked, [the desk man] should have said: how may I help you, Mahmoud 12 sir?” (Killing Floor 18), as if entering a 5-star hotel. Later, an FBI agent informs Reacher the town did not have a single homicide in three decades. On a first look, Margrave is an embodiment of a utopia.

Yet despite its growing infrastructure, it is hard to miss Margrave’s lifelessness and dying market. Margrave is a town “deserted most of the time” (Killing Floor 331), as Reacher frequently repeats. The stores in the town are only half-open. The owner of a barbershop, a place

“[n]ot really open for business, not really closed” (Killing Floor 134), tells him they had no customers in two days. When he visits a convenience store for some coffee, he notes the place

“was selling the sort of stuff which gave it a good enough excuse to be open on a Sunday morning. Open, but not busy” (Killing Floor 130). Even more, the diner Reacher was eating in when he was arrested at the beginning of the book embodies the contrasting features of the town, as described by Reacher:

Brand-new place. Gleaming, state-of-the-art diner. But [the owner] never has any

customers. I’ve been in there a couple of times. There were never more than a couple of

people in the place. The waitresses outnumber the customers. (Killing Floor 331)

A pristine place Reacher repeats has food and “good coffee” (Killing Floor 170) is left empty and serving no one most of the time, like Margrave itself. Shiny and modern but not living up to its expectation. From the outside, Margrave may look the farthest from being economically vulnerable a town could be.

However, later we find out that the town is running on counterfeit money replacing its job market and threatening the collapse of whatever’s left. In a conversation between Reacher and

FBI agent Finlay, we are given glimpses of how the vulnerability started through Reacher’s vexation: Mahmoud 13

‘[Eisenhower] built the interstates … He killed Margrave. Way back, that old county road

was the only road. Everybody and everything had to pass through Margrave. The place

was full of rooming houses and bars, people were passing through, spending money.

Then the highways got built, and air travel got cheap, and suddenly the town died. It

withered a way to a dot on the map because the highway missed it by fourteen miles.’

(Killing Floor 442)

The vulnerability, as shown in the example, started with modernizing the transportation system route, which disconnected the town from neighboring towns and states whose residents used to benefit Margrave’s income, causing an economic decline. The failure to account for the negative effects of state’s planning to left Margrave neglected and caused a vulnerability, with no alternative solution presented to compensate for the economic loss the town suffered.

As a result of this falling economy and Margrave being far from anyone’s reach, criminal money— as represented by Reacher’s antagonist Kliner, who runs money counterfeiting business— found a home in vulnerable Margrave. “Using a sleepy nowhere like Margrave as the distribution centre [for counterfeit money] would be smart” (Killing Floor 336), remarks

Reacher, because in a town cut from the map and practically invisible threat goes unnoticed. An outsider, Kliner relocates to Margrave, establishes a non-profit charity as a mask for his counterfeiting business, and renovates the town with the fake money he produces as means of distributing it and feeding it into the system. Having established a Foundation that “’[b]enefits the town in a lot of ways’” (Killing Floor 132), Kliner, as a restaurant owner explains, moved to

Margrave, and it has “’been like Christmas ever since’” (Killing Floor 132). “Christmas” is the money distributed to locals on a regular basis,. “’Man, I shouldn’t tell you about it’,” says the barbershop owner to Reacher, as he informs him that “all merchants” earn a grand a week as part Mahmoud 14

of the “community program” (Killing Floor 256). This works to suppress the community’s need

for jobs and customers who may risk exposing Kliner’s illegal operation.

While counterfeiting threatens the economy of the whole country, Margrave is the biggest victim for being completely dependent on it. Kliner’s single ‘solution’ to a collective problem earned him economic monopoly on the town. The whole of Margrave was bought “a grand a week, here and there” (Killing Floor 333), Reacher notes. For this reason, the locals “all keep their mouths shut and look away from whatever needs looking away from” (Killing Floor 333), for as

Reacher remarks, “when Kliner’s dirty money was taken out, the whole town was going to fall apart” (Killing Floor 359). Corruption controls the town, and here, it is money that is the weapon.

The interstate system mentioned in the example earlier is but a metaphor for modernization and the effects it has on places not deemed valuable to state. As Reacher remarks to FBI agents

Finlay and Roscoe, constituting a team of three working together throughout the story, the town is running on money it cannot afford or sustain:

I’ve been down here five days, right? Prior to that I was all over the States for six months.

Prior to that I was all over the world. Margrave is by far the cleanest, best maintained,

most manicured place I’ve ever seen. It’s better looked after than the Pentagon or the

White House. Believe me, I’ve been there. Everything in Margrave is either brand new or

else perfectly renovated. (Killing Floor 331)

Here, the agents he speaks to, and by extension the locals, are so immersed in the corruption that

they either fail to see it, or cannot talk about it without taking a risk with their lives. It took an

outsider with a fresh eye to consciously note the precarity of the town. Mahmoud 15

A nostalgic remark by one of the locals reminiscing over a prosperous town, supported by its own economy, further highlights the town’s current vulnerability through giving it a contrast:

‘Everybody used to stop off here … North side of town was just pretty much a mess of

bars and rooming houses to cater to the folks passing through. All these [new] fancy

gardens between here and the fire house is where the bard and rooming houses used to

be. All tore down now, or else fell down. Been no passing trade at all for a real long time.

But back then, it was a different kind of town altogether, streams of people in and out, the

whole time. Workers, crop pickers, drummers, fighters, hoboes, truckers, musicians. All

kinds of those guys used to stop off and play.’ (Killing Floor 137)

The example shows not only that the town used to support itself through visitors from outside and thus lost a big part of its economy when that stopped, but it shows a sense of community also lost as a result of being cut from the main road. In Killing Floor, a previously prosperous town turned a centre of economic warfare as a result of being overlooked.

Unlike Margrave, in Die Trying, the economic vulnerability of a Montana town called

Yorke merely precedes a social one. Yorke does not display a futuristic exterior. Without a booming infrastructure, the town is “pretty much dead. Looked like it had died some time ago”

(Die Trying 281). However, like Margrave, it had been of value once, thanks to a history of mining that helped support its growth. In a dialogue between Reacher and a member of the militia, we follow as the town’s history is briefly mentioned:

‘This was a mining town … Lead, mostly, but some copper, and a couple of seams of

good silver for a while. There was a lot of money made here’ …

‘So what happened?’ Reacher asked … Mahmoud 16

‘What happens to any mining place? ... It gets worked out, is what. Fifty years ago,

people were registering claims in that old county office like there was no tomorrow, and

they were disputing them in that old courthouse, and there were saloons and banks and

stores up and down the street. Then they started coming up with dirt instead of metal and

they moved on.’ (Die Trying 281-282)

This example gives an insight into the decline of the town. Like Margrave, Yorke once had a thriving environment that kept it alive, but died with time and was not given the support to aid its economic development and flourish again, because it lost value to state. The weakening of the town’s economy is one of the factors that contribute to its precarity.

The other, main factor is the total absence of security. Yorke is a town with no police offices. The nearest FBI office to Yorke is in another town, Butte, far away, and even that office is hardly working that it is narrated as a joke in the book that the office even exists:

The relationship between the rest of the FBI and the Field Office in Butte, Montana, is

similar to the relationship between Moscow and Siberia, proverbially speaking. It’s a

standard Bureau joke. Screw up, the joke goes, and you’ll be working out of Butte

tomorrow. Like some kind of an internal exile. (Die Trying 312)

The lack law enforcement exposed the town to crime, and indeed, Yorke is violently taken over and its community subjugated as a result. Radical violence— as represented by Borken, a right- wing extremist who admires the swastika (and not in its Buddhist understanding) and buys into conspiracy theories— ensues in Yorke due to the absence of governmental authority and security.

In a discussion among two officials of the FBI office in Chicago, Harold Webster and

General Johnson, the violent takeover is further attributed to lack of security: Mahmoud 17

‘Effectively, [Borken and the militia] control Yorke county,’ Webster said.

’How is that possible’? Johnson asked.

‘Because nobody else does,’ Webster said. You ever been up there? I haven’t … the

whole place is abandoned … there’s just a couple dozen citizens still around, spread out

over miles of empty territory, bankrupt ranchers, leftover miners, old folk. No effective

county government. (Die Trying 301)

Describing the precarity of the town followed by the mention of government absence highlights state as the expected authority to prevent such precarity, responsible, but failing to tend to the security of its citizens.

In Yorke, the violent subjugation of the town’s community accentuates its social vulnerability. The militia leader, who plans to “take America back, piece by piece” (Die Trying

231), forces the locals to obey his orders or face death, as Reacher is told by a local who asks for his help:

It’s a long story. Most of us were up here with other groups, just surviving on our own,

with our families ... Then Borken started coming around, talking about unity. He fought

and argued. The other leaders disagreed with his views. Then they just started

disappearing ... Some of us are more or less prisoners here. (Die Trying 391)

Examples of coercion of community members held beyond their wish, including forced labor and condensing children’s “school” to custom interpretations of “the Bible, the Constitution, [and] history” (Die Trying 290) woven together to construct a racist, violence-driven narrative, constitute the town’s precarity.

An unequal distribution of vulnerability breeds an equally disproportionate amount of instability. As Butler says, “[i]t may sound odd to refer to an unequal distribution of Mahmoud 18 vulnerability, but perhaps there is no other way to understand the condition of contemporary precarity” (5). In Yorke and Margrave, economic and social vulnerabilities are exposed following the failure to provide alternatives to economic decline and sufficient security measures. So, while they look different at first, examples from both towns allude to the fact that the vulnerability is increased through state neglect.

The way to end precarity, for Butler, is for vulnerable people to realize the power they have and use it a form of resistance. That, however, is not always possible, and where agency or authoritative power is not an option, precarity justifies actions of an extra-legal nature. Mahmoud 19

Vigilantism

And now, what will become of us without barbarians? Those people were some sort of a solution.

- C.P. Cavafy In both Killing Floor and Die Trying, vigilantism is justified through the impossibility of agency due to the presence of violence that constitutes a direct threat to people’s lives, making vigilantism both needed and reassuring.

In Killing Floor, Reacher intervenes when frequent murders occur with close proximity to each other. When an operation on national level starts looking into smuggling illegal money into the country, Kliner feels threatened and starts “panicking …[and] killing” community members and anyone who threaten to expose his counterfeit business (Killing Floor 390).

Reacher remarks to FBI agent Finlay that there was “[n]o homicides in thirty years [in Margrave] and now [there are] five all at once” (Killing Floor 192). When Finlay remarks that Reacher is being too secretive about how he wants to handle the issue, Reacher replies: “’I’m a cautious guy, Finlay ... People are getting killed here’” (Killing Floor 198). A precarity this severe renders agency, as means of non-violent resistance, impossible. Butler’s notion of using the agency of vulnerability, which encourages the vulnerable people to speak out, would be in this case a one- way ticket to death. The kind of implicit contract that the locals of Margrave had with Kliner— which meant not speaking out against him due to their dependability on the money he was providing the town with— has in the end put their community and their lives at risk.

Reacher targets Kliner and the mayor of the town involved with him, Teale, on the basis of their moral failure. In a discussion with FBI agent Finlay, Reacher contends that “the town sold the land for the [business] warehouse to earn itself some new money … Old Teale brokered the deal. But he didn’t have the courage to say no when the new money turned out to be bad Mahmoud 20 money” (Killing Floor 442). Despite acknowledging that the warehouse Kliner uses to store counterfeit money was initially sold as means of earning money for the town, Reacher overlooks the fact that it is this need for money, the economic vulnerability, that is the root of the problem.

Instead, he lays full blame on the moralistic failure of few men and acts accordingly. The reason he is needed is, while he has a moral compass, he is a violent man, and if someone is guilty in his view, he does not hesitate to execute sentence. To be clear, I do not mean to propose a stand on the use of violence, but rather to show that the impossibility of mobilizing vulnerability is the way the novel justifies Reacher’s actions.

To start, when the son of Kliner attacks Reacher one night with a group of four other men intending to kill him when Kliner realizes Reacher and his team of two, FBI agents Finlay and

Roscoe, are close to exposing him, Reacher strategically kills the son, admitting he “had to leave old man Kliner unsettled … had to keep him guessing about what had happened. About where his boy had disappeared to. It would unbalance him ” (Killing Floor 411). For Reacher, Kliner is to blame fully for the town’s precarity, and getting rid of him, starting with his son, constitutes the solution. The story resolves when FBI agent Finlay and Reacher sneak into Kliner’s warehouse knowing Kliner and mayor Teale are there, and kill them both. Then, Finlay pours gas on the floor and lights up the warehouse leaving it to explode, burning all of Kliner’s stockpile of money with his body next to them.

Similarly, in Die Trying, Reacher’s initial interest in Yorke does not go beyond wanting to escape being kidnapped by the militia. It is only when one of Yorke’s locals reaches out to him, secretly, that his priorities shift:

‘I need to talk to you,’ [the woman] whispered. ‘Find me after lights-out tonight.’ …

‘Talk to me now, I could be gone by then.’ Mahmoud 21

‘You’ve got to help us,’ the woman whispered. (Die Trying 288)

Without being able to say more due to militia members keeping a watch, the woman then leaves quickly. This example shows another case where the consequences of mobilizing vulnerability would be of great harm. Later as the same woman sneaks out in secret to speak to Reacher again, she tells him that there is nothing they can do, as when “the other leaders disagreed with

[Borken’s] views … they just started disappearing” (Die Trying 391), and later their bodies were found as Borken has ordered their murder.

The main reason for Yorke’s social vulnerability which results in militia takeover is the total absence of law enforcement which exposed the town and made the takeover possible in the first place. Yet, the resolution shifts to Reacher’s focus on the militia’s leader Borken, who

Reacher garners personal hatred towards, likening him to Stalin, describing him as “fat boy“ (Die

Trying 347), and calling him “crazy” (Die Trying 260) to his face. Later, Reacher kills Borken, having killed his circle of close men before him, and the story ends with the aftermath of the plot, with the FBI and the army eventually getting there and demolishing the militia camp:

Yorke County was sealed off and secret army units were moving in and out around the

clock. Medical corpsmen removed the bodies [of the town’s leaders Borken killed for

disagreeing with him]. They found five mutilated bodies in another cave … Engineers

moved in and dynamited the mine entrances. Sappers moved into the Bastion [that the

militia built] and disabled the water supply and tore down the power lines. (Die Trying

556)

Die Trying’s ending, like Killing Floor’s, champions Reacher’s approach to the problem. It is a reassuring resolution. The bad men are gone and the people are safe again, albeit temporarily.

The books give us final closure by telling us Reacher hitched a ride out of the town he was in, or Mahmoud 22 in a new town already, planning to stay for a few days, setting the scene for the next adventure, where he’ll likely stumble into a new problem upon arrival. The ending is reassuring, telling us

Reacher finished the task he set out to achieve. However, more interestingly and provocatively, it also exposes this solution as not sufficient at all. Mahmoud 23

A Hybrid Ending

This paper has so far engaged the Jack Reacher series in the discussion of vulnerability and precarity, claiming that the solution provided, in imagining individual acts of vigilantism as the antidote to structural vulnerability, is reassuring. However, while the series’ way of resolving conflicts is indeed reassuring, it is not sufficient.

After Reacher executes Kliner and Borken and the locals of Margrave and Yorke get back a piece of mind, there is no mention of a community rehabilitation or social support for a new life in either town. There is no promise that new rules have been put in place should either of the towns and the locals be targeted again. We are left to assume everything is okay. But individuals, such as Kliner and Borken, are not the root cause for the vulnerability that affected the town, rather it is a structural problem. As Bryan Turner makes clear, “[h]uman rights abuses are not typically the result of the actions of criminal individuals, but of states and their agents”

(33), who fail to prevent the problems in the first place. Thus, Reacher’s solution, while temporarily numbing the problem, is similar to tending to a symptom but not the illness causing it.

Reacher cannot solve the vulnerability because it is not his problem to solve, rather the solution is part of a complex process needing action from that of an authoritative figure or the community directly affected, and hence his methods continue to be insufficient. Where Butler argues that collective work is needed and that such solution will not work before we start to see society as a whole rather than an individual, she means that acts of resistance are not fruitful before the “I” changes into a “we”, and for Reacher, his method falls short because he resolves to the former. Mahmoud 24

Another element to take note of is Reacher’s cooperation with the police throughout the books, which breaks the western fantasy of the absolute individual who comes in and saves the town then leaves. This further assert that he is merely helping in times of urgent need, not more.

In both Killing Floor and Die Trying, Reacher cooperates with the police constantly and does not work totally on his own.

That being said, while the cooperation between Reacher and the police provide an element of practicality through allowing the government to take part in the solution, it does not blur the lines between the two ideologies, but rather offers a consolidation of the two; combining them into a coherent whole whose parts are still distinguishable. In short, it displays an integration of the two principles, but not an assimilation. This relationship between Reacher and FBI agent Roscoe in Killing Floor is a great illustration of this point.

Reacher and Roscoe become romantically involved in the story, and in their relationship lies a stark symbolism that suggests an undeniable yet irreconcilable relationship between government and vigilantism, state justice and personal justice. Roscoe cooperates with Reacher from the start, even finds comfort in his ability to deter Kliner’s men throughout the book, knowing none of his measures are legal or non-violent, yet at the end of the book, Reacher notes,

“it didn’t work out for Roscoe and me” (Killing Floor 515). Even though Reacher thinks seriously about settling with Roscoe throughout the book, he finally admits that the relationship

“never really stood a chance” (Killing Floor 515), denoting the impossibility of reconciling his methods with what that reconciliation would eventuate. This is evident in one of their last discussions in the aftermath of Killing Floor, as Reacher asks Roscoe what she plans to do now that the mission of going after Kliner ended:

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her. Mahmoud 25

She looked at me like it was an odd question.

‘Work my butt off, I guess,’ she said. ‘There’s going to be a lot to do. We’re going to

have to rebuild this whole town. Maybe we can make something better out of it …

Maybe I’ll get on the town board. Maybe I’ll even run for mayor’ …

It was a great answer … But it was the wrong answer for me. Because I knew by then I

had to go …

We didn’t fall out over it ... She knew what I was going to do was right for me. I knew

what she was going to do was right for her. She asked me to stay. I thought hard, but said

no. I asked her to come with me. She thought hard, but said no. Nothing more to say.

(Killing Floor 520-522)

Because state’s principle is to uphold the law while vigilantism’s is characterized by going beyond it, state and vigilantism constitute a binary that makes their unification difficult. Still, this binary does not negate the fact that they can, and do, work together. This contrast in the way the solution is presented, accounts for the way the series highlights a solution that is not fairytale- like. Mahmoud 26

Conclusion

Although Killing Floor and Die Trying in the Jack Reacher series show a complex display of vulnerability, presenting it as a political issue left unaddressed and leading to precarity, the series retreats to a genre-classic reassuring ending featuring individual acts of vigilantism. However, while the ending is reassuring, it is not sufficient, leaving the vulnerability intact and making no explicit mention of policy change or support given to the communities to prevent another attack that could threaten their lives. If anything, by presenting a multifaceted issue and contrasting it with an inability to remedy on an equally effective level, the Jack

Reacher series stresses the difficulty of providing a simple solution to a complex issue, and seeks to dramatize the stories’ climax with an orchestra of gripping suspense as if to compensate for lacking the real answer.

I argued that individual acts of vigilantism are presented with the justification that vulnerable communities are unable to take action themselves due to the severity of the risk posed on their lives. This precarity, constituting from criminal wealth in Margrave and community subjugation in Yorke, I argued, is the result of state neglect. Failing to provide the towns with structural solutions to compensate for the losses the towns suffered exposed an economic and a social vulnerability in the towns Margrave and Yorke. The economic vulnerability in Margrave, I argued, is the result of the town being overlooked when modernization of the transportation took place, preventing the town from benefitting from travelers of neighboring areas who accounted for much of the town’s income. In Yorke, the lack of security and law enforcement exposed groups of families to be violently attacked. The main cause argued in this paper for these vulnerabilities is state neglect. Reacher’s solution, by removing the criminal element, cannot reach beyond the short-term solution and into the root problem which is a political one. Mahmoud 27

Previous research has looked into the appeal of Reacher himself. However the value of this paper is giving an account to why this appealing hero is needed. This analysis of the reasons

Reacher’s methods are needed in the first place has been my aim in this paper. The Jack Reacher series, and even other crime/suspense fiction should be analyzed through looking at the need the protagonists are called upon tend to, so we may better understand how the genre represents different issues. In my paper, I have analyzed the first two books of the series, and future work, investigating how representation of vulnerability develops throughout other books in the series, might prove important. The Jack Reacher series entices the reader to think further about real challenges. For the wanderer, dépaysement-seeker Reacher, the lack of permanent place means that he belongs to no place and every place at the same time; Reacher is a “metaphor wrapped up inside a metonym” (Martin). This, perhaps, is why readers cannot put down a Reacher book. Mahmoud 28

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